On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:16 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee@gmail.com> wrote:
I think the right conclusion has been reached (don't change anything),
Cool.
but I will add that expecting everyone to have /tmp as a tmpfs is extremely limiting. I also disagree with your unbacked-with-facts conclusion that "99.99%" of people are satisfied with a /tmp on tmpfs; of my 5 machines running Arch only 2 have /tmp on tmpfs. I can think of several situations where this is just plain impractical: * Running on a VPS/VM with limited RAM * Any situation that requires /tmp to be bigger than the size of RAM (or even bigger than half of it) * Any setup where I have a highly performant RAID setup (or maybe SSDs are involved); being on disk will be just fine
It seems lots of people do this. However, I would like to point out that using tmpfs does not mean that you will use more ram than otherwise. Just like a normal fs will be backed up by a disk a tmpfs will be backed up by swap. So all the above scenarios would be better of with /tmp on tmpfs. (Provided you turn the partition that would otherwise have housed /tmp into swap space and set the size of your /tmp partition equal to the size of your old /tmp partition). The only downside I have found is that there is a 256GB size limit on files on a tmpfs which does not exist on a normal fs. So if you expect to have any particular file be bigger than that, you'd better go with a normal partition. If I'm missing something, please let me know (I have been reading/asking around and about this for a while now, so any info is welcome). Cheers, Tom